


nothing besides remains

by Megkips



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 01:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20957945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megkips/pseuds/Megkips
Summary: In which the only remains of Dracula are properly buried.





	nothing besides remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [geckoholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/gifts).

> Happy Halloween, Geckoholic!

There were a great many projects to undertake once Alucard found the means to extricate himself from the first awful wave of grief. The Hold needed to be drained of blood and a new staircase put in. The castle’s grand entrance was in an awful state, and the broken windows meant an open invitation to bold birds and daring squirrels. Entire sections of the building were demolished. There was glass shards everywhere that, if not dealt with immediately, would be a plague he’d be stepping on for centuries.

It was a blessing in its own way. Sitting down, itemizing each problem, ranking them by priority - all of the planning allowed for time to slip away. Beginning the work in earnest? That was the single greatest distraction the dhampir could have asked for.

Months went by. Glass was swept away. Furniture that could not be salvaged became fuel for the castle’s furnaces. The Belmont Hold had an entire section of books dedicated to how best to remove blood in large quantities from a specific place. Plans were drawn for the Hold’s new staircase. Supplies were ordered. The work that lay ahead was accounted for room by room by room, save for one. That room - well. It could wait.

It waited a year and a half, in the high heat of summer and in the daylight. Alucard walked in with a steadiness he did not feel and was all too quickly broken. He managed five seconds in the room, eyes lingering on the broken footboard of his childhood bed and the awful, awful burn mark forever etched onto the floor. It was wrong, removing it, but to look at it brought everything to the surface in one terrible swoop.

But there was a glint on the floor.

It was easy to force his own superhuman speed to go to work before his mind could catch up. Alucard’s fingers grabbed something cold and metal before tears could take up the full of his vision, and once the tiny glinting thing was off the floor, he understood what it was.

His father’s wedding ring was then placed aside, atop an end table in a sitting room that saw no use. It needed a final resting place, but off the floor was a start.

_Where?_ soon became a constant thought in Alucard’s life. He’d look to a corner or a shelf and wonder if it was the right place, only to shake his head moments later, discarding the thought. _Where?_ meant _Where should my father’s remains be?_ and that question set off a new wave of grief that saw the dhampir working himself harder.

It was an effect quickly noticed by Sypha and Trevor when they came back to the castle after a good six weeks away, exhausted and pleased to be hiding in the only building in Wallachia to have the miracle of Dracula’s science that was _air conditioning_ Alucard kept his long hours, coming to bed late and rising early. Cooked for all three but said little. 

“We should make an elaborate meal request of him,” Sypha murmured to Trevor about four days into their stay. “It’s the only way to try and pin him down and talk after dinner.”

Ever the strategist in dealing with vampires, Trevor nodded his head. “You make it. He has a harder time saying no to you.”

So Sypha did, resulting in all too elaborate meal that involved a very large portion of freshly hunted boar and all the berries of summer. She and Trevor ate slowly, filling in Alucard of Wallachia’s new triumphs and woes. (That he hadn’t asked immediately upon their return had been the first indicator of trouble.) He nodded, asked a few questions, but otherwise the awful icy well of sadness dominated, following them from dining room to _their_ sitting room.

“Alright, I give up,” Trevor said after Sypha finished the last story she had of road adventures. She was sitting beside the dhampir on the sofa, and Trevor settled into the armchair right beside it. The room was, after all, nothing but plush sofas and window nooks for reading. “Alucard, you’re being sadder than usual. What happened between the time we left and now?”

Sypha opened her mouth, expecting a reprimand to come out in Trevor’s direction. Instead, she made a soft noise of frustration at him, then turned her eyes to Alucard. “He’s not wrong in what he’s observing, Adrian. Usually you’re far happier to have us home. Were there unexpected visitors or...?”

The question trailed off in the hope that Alucard might happily fill in the blank with a response. He didn’t. 

But he did find words. “It’ll be easier if I show you”

Alucard stood up and exited the room, leaving Trevor and Sypha to exchange confused and worried glances with each other. Trevor shrugged, only to be met with Sypha’s worried sigh, and both went silent as Alucard re-entered the room.

The ring lay flat in Alucard’s hand, the cool metal almost a match for the dhampir’s body heat. Both Trevor and Sypha leaned in out of instinct to try and see what it was when he stopped in front of them, only to find the politest way to recoil the moment they realized what they were looking at.

“That’s...rough,” Trevor offered eloquently. It was only the low volume of his voice that made it clear he truly did feel for the emotion behind it all.

Sypha’s words were only a little better. “It’s been in the room all this time, then.”

Alucard nodded. “Yes.”

The unspoken question of what was to be done with the ring remained unspoken for the obvious reason: if Alucard knew, he wouldn’t be showing the ring to the other two. An awful, terrible silence settled on the three instead, and Alucard returned to his seat on the sofa. Dracula’s wedding ring was the only physical remnant of the vampire left in the world and the only physical reminder of what the three had done for all of Wallachia’s sake.

Inch by inch, Alucard’s fingers closed in around the ring, eventually hiding the thing from the little bit of daylight that streamed in from the sitting room’s grand windows. 

“Is there a place that...” Trevor attempted, but then stopped. “It can’t go in the Hold.”

“On that we agree,” Alucard said. He wanted to manage something snide, about it being a Belmont trophy, but there was no point to it. They sniped only occasionally now, and it was never over something that sensitive. “Even if it would be secure.”

“Mmm.”

Trevor’s rumble was followed by a far too heavy and much too long silence. Alucard slipped his hand into the pocket of his trousers and deposited the ring there. Slowly, surely, he began to sink down against the sofa, nearly being devoured by cushions as Sypha felt the coolness of his hand in hers slip away.

“Adrian?” Sypha asked eventually, the silence breaking only slightly as the question came at an almost impossibly low volume. It wasn’t new to Alucard or Trevor though - it was the volume she used when an impossibly delicate and painful question was about to be asked. “I know that there wouldn’t have been an opportunity to recover your mother’s ring, but is there a place here that was truly hers?”

“That wasn’t shared or...” Alucard began, before flinching at the weight of the question. There were the laboratory rooms that were his mother’s, of course. He had been able to walk into those without flinching, but that was only because they were a potential hazard site. It was unclear how much glass had been destroyed and what in-progress experiments had been disrupted and could be caustic, and so concern and purpose had overruled the emotion of the moment. Thinking of where he dared to tread, there was always his parents’ bedroom, and more than once Alucard’s mind had drifted over to the portrait of Lisa Tepes in his father’s study. But that painting was a far more idealized image of her, and to put the ring there had always felt wrong.

The weight of realization pressed against him suddenly. “Her study.”

He had checked the laboratories. It was all a part of the castle’s initial damage assessment, before work could be prioritized. Nothing had gone awry in them, nothing had shattered; every last one of them were perfectly in place. It was at that moment that Alucard realized that in the entire fight with Dracula, they had never even come close to the section of the castle where Lisa did all of her own work. Hardly a coincidence.

So her study had gone uninspected, for the simple reason of _if the labs are fine, then the study must be fine as well._ A nice lie to avoid an emotionally perilous place, for he often found his way there as a teenager, helping his mother work in daylight hours when his father slept, hidden from the sun. It was a study that smelled not of musty books or dried, sticky things from experiments, but of fresh parchment and newly created ink. There’d be faint scents of grease from a machine that had decided to fight back, or perhaps antiseptic. Lisa’s impossible warmth filled it, though, and...

...yes, it was the right place for the ring, wasn’t it? The physical manifestation of her intellect and desire to learn. Why the two had wed in the first place.

Sypha’s hand rested on Alucard’s shoulder, trying to anchor him. “Adrian?”

“I...yes, sorry,” Aluacard managed, realizing from the concerned stare from Trevor across from him and the firmness of Sypha’s hand that he must have fallen silent for a few moments too many. “Her study would fit the bill. It’s...er. A walk, I’m afraid.”

Trevor let out a soft huff. “Why am I not surprised? There’s nothing nearby anything here.”

The complaint received only an eyeroll from Alucard. It wasn’t an unfair dig, and the tone had a certain comfort to it. Trevor’s own way of trying to help. “It wasn’t designed for people.”

“Definitely not designed for Belmonts,” Trevor continued, getting to his feet. “Come on then. This is going to be a good half an hour with stairs, I already know it.”

Sypha’s groan of Trevor’s name matched with a low noise that might almost have been a laugh from Alucard. The tension from the task ahead remained heavy in the air, but it was better. If only for a moment.

It did take time going up the flights of stairs to reach Lisa’s study. In his youth, Alucard would float up them, taking advantage of both his natural levitation ability and superhuman speed. Five minutes, tops. He had timed it once before. Now? Well, Trevor had been off by fifteen minutes, but it left Alucard with a new appreciation for exactly how his mother managed the impossible layout of the castle for two decades.

The study was as Alucard recalled it - a decent-sized stone room with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. A deeply plush rug imported from Persia meant to evoke a garden, delicately woven pomegranates and grapes and apples and all the wonderful harvest foods placed in perfect harmony with each other, guard dogs set at each of the rug’s corners. A door to the east and a door to the west connected both of the lab rooms to the study. His mother’s desk sat pushed against the north wall, along with the plush swivel chair his father had made for her, all neatly organized with a small bookshelf above it, each book the same size and shape and bound in the same pale, unadorned leather binding. The shelfmarks on each spine bore a simple Arabic numeral in his mother’s writing. Her research journals, from the first she began before meeting Dracula to the very last.

Well, not her very last. That one would have been at the house in Lupu, still used until the moment it became ash. As so many things seemed to in the Tepes household.

It was impossible not to feel the sensation of Sypha and Trevor trying to peek around the dhampir as he stood just inside the doorway. Trevor was the one who gently forced Alucard forward with a single hand to the dhampir’s back, but neither strayed far from Alucard’s side.

“You can look around,” Alucard said, withdrawing his hand from his pocket. “She’d want that. Let others see her work.”

Alucard could see Sypha’s question forming, _Are you sure?_ and so he nodded once before taking the remaining steps towards his mother’s desk. Sypha, for her part, politely tried to be interested in the medical tomes lining the shelves, leaning in to look at their spines, whereas Trevor simply found a single spot to lean against (a different book case), eyes resting on anything but Alucard.

It was as good an attempt to provide both privacy and support as anyone could ask for. It was most certainly enough for the dhampir to reach the desk itself, long fingers curling on the back of the chair. The dark maroon fabric was as soft as it had ever been, and with it, there was a far more recognizable smell than the room’s overwhelming cleanliness. Every single living thing had its own identifiable scent, and fabrics could hold onto such smells for a very long time.

Alucard let out a breath. His hand left the chair, and reached for the first journal. It was the thinnest of the group and the roughest. Lisa had sewn it herself, or so she told him years ago when he asked after its poor state. Leather and paper weren’t cheap, so buying things separately and then making one’s own journal was easier. The journal was light in his hand then, when she let him hold it. It was light now, and it still bore his mother’s early bookbinding attempts. String stuck out. The pages were roughly put together and uneveningly aligned, the work of someone trying to assemble the thing quickly and perhaps out of sight. Alucard knew his mother. It seemed about right.

Gently, he placed the journal down on the desk, then retrieved the ring. He could leave them there. Let them gather dust together. But it was too simple, and the blank spot on the bookshelf bothered Alucard’s eye.

“Hm,” he breathed out, before his eye caught the string again. Carefully, he opened the journal to its first page, and a thin, faint smile flickered across his face. There was almost too much string.

The rest happened in slow motion. Picking the ring up. Tying it with the string so it could be a part of the journal. Putting the whole assemblage away and having to eke out just a little bit more space on the shelf to account for the change in the journal’s size. It was just a small change, but it impacted everything around it. That metaphor felt right.

Alucard stared at the shelf full of journals for a moment more before turning to the other two (whose eyes he had felt upon his back the entire time.) “Done.”

Sypha’s face had quiet concern that was carefully plotting the right words to say next. Trevor’s face was all awkward, trying to settle on what the right emotion was for the moment without being patronizing. They were both faces Alucard had seen many times before, and he met those faces with a very thin, fragile smile before he took a step forward. Within moments, all three were at the door, then out the other side of it. It clicked shut softly, and Alucard turned his back to it.

“No locks?” Trevor asked, lingering by the door.

“No locks,” the dhampir confirmed. “She wouldn’t want that, and she’d encourage either of you to go in and look whenever you wished.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you to Sara for the beta and Alex for the feedback.


End file.
